This morning I’d like to call your attention to three outstanding recent examples of enterprise journalism in The Boston Globe. On Friday I shared my last gift links for the month to The New York Times (those links should still work, by the way); the Globe, unfortunately, has a tight paywall with no gift links. One, however, is a podcast that you can listen to for free. So here we go.
“The DEA said it arrested 171 ‘high ranking’ Sinaloa Cartel members. A Spotlight investigation found that’s not true.,” by Andrew Ryan, Hanna Krueger, Joey Flechas, Steven Porter and Amanda Milkovits, and edited by Gordon Russell.
The federal Drug Enforcement Administration has claimed that it’s made a major dent in the flow of illegal drugs in New England by arresting high-value suspects from a Latin American drug cartel. The Globe found that, in fact, the suspects were overwhelmingly “addicts, low-level dealers, shoplifters, and people living at a homeless encampment.” The Spotlight Team wrote:
“I can guarantee that he’s not part of the Sinaloa Cartel,” Scott Alati said of his son, Tyler, who was charged in state court in Franklin with a felony-level drug sale and immediately released without having to post bail. “He isn’t a high-ranking member of anything. He’s high-ranking dumb.”
In an editorial published today, the Globe asks: “If the Trump administration isn’t telling the truth about drug raids in New Hampshire, can people believe its rationale for killing supposed drug runners in the Caribbean?”
The answer is no. No, we can’t.
“Water is coming for the Seaport; the whole city will be poorer for it,” by Catherine Carlock and Yoohyun Jung. The story about how climate change threatens to inundate the Seaport District because of rising water levels is just one of a package. Other articles examine the effects of climate change-induced flooding on Morrissey Boulevard in Dorchester, the low-lying town of Hull, the pressure on levees in cities like Chicopee, and what is happening in small coastal communities.
Carlock and Jung write of the Seaport:
Rising seas threaten to reclaim those old mud flats, and, together with more frequent and severe storms, could swamp the neighborhood that has risen atop them. In all, 99 percent of what’s been built in the Seaport in the last quarter-century is at risk of flooding by 2050, according to a recent analysis from the Metropolitan Area Planning Council.
I want to call your attention to an interactive map put together by Jung and John Hancock that’s based on data from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which the Trump regime has been busily wrecking. You can enter any address and see what the risks are. It turns out that we’re far enough uphill from the Mystic Lakes that we have little to worry about, but that’s not true of our neighbors closer to the shore.
The digital presentation of the entire series is outstanding.
“The Harvard Plan, Season 2,” by Ilya Marritz. I do not share the Globe’s obsession with all things Harvard. But I listened to Season 1 on the fall of former Harvard president Claudine Gay and got more out of it than I had expected. Over the weekend I caught the first episode of Season 2, which deals with the Trump regime’s assault on Harvard and other universities. As someone who works for a large university, I couldn’t help but be enthralled.
The podcast is a collaboration between the Globe and the public radio program “On the Media,” and it’s free. I was especially taken with Kit Parker, a bioengineering and physics professor, Army officer and self-described conservative Trump supporter. Parker is in favor of Trump’s crusade. At one point he says:
We’re unable to complete our mission by hosting debate and thoughtful discussion about the issues of the day represented by both sides. We continue to lower standards for admissions and scholarship, and integrity of scholarship.
We had spent 10 years talking about diversity, equity, inclusion, while we were aggressively excluding or silencing conservative voices on campus. Harvard should be like an intellectual cage match.
Of course, there are also more liberal faculty members who express horror at what Trump is doing as well as ambivalence over how Harvard should respond.
If you live in the Boston area and you’re reading this blog, then you’re probably already a Globe subscriber. But as I’ve said before, I wish they’d offer a few gift links per month, and I think it would result in more paid subscribers.